Formatted on a Win10 machine did that because technically a CF is removable media but added the Win10 crap to it. WinXP defaults to a max 32GB C: drive if you do FAT32 (only other choice is NTFS off the XP cd AFAIK).
You could use a third party boot disk (Hirens??) and do a full 64Gb FAT32 partition and format then install XP to it....

added: best if you wipe the CF on same Win10 machine before trying anything else or you might get an access violation 🤣 (has happened a few times ;p) when trying something else to re-Fdisk+format

I think the same, Win XP does not allow to Format as FAT32 on a medium that has 32GB capacity and beyond.
However, it can use such medium perfectly fine if it was pre-formatted that way (just think of external USB HDDs).

britain4 wrote on 2021-05-21, 21:30:

Does anyone know if the two above issues could be linked and if so how to mark the CF card as a fixed drive? If not, anyone have any suggestions on the swap file issue?

Thanks!

Many, many years ago there was a DOS utility (leaked?) for SanDisk cards that could flip that bit on the CF..
However, it was meant for SanDisk cards only and likely doesn't work with current cards.

To my understanding, "Fixed" cards are only available for embedded or industrial markets.
Normally consumers cards are all "removable".

Anyway, that's no issue per se.
It's just a single bit that the CF cards remembers.
The card itself does not care about that bit at all.
It's Windows NT itself which makes a bit fuss about the card being fixed/removable.

Back in the early 2000s, the Car PC enthusiasts discovered a way to make use of some files from XP Embedded.

The EWF filter and a modified INF is all it needs to get XP on any removable CF.

https://flylib.com/books/en/3.234.1.73/1/

Thanks for the replies folks. The card is recognised as a 32GB disk regardless of whether it’s NTFS or FAT32 - when the card is formatted on Windows 10 the XP setup reports it’s a 64GB NTFS partition on a 32GB drive (?) but installs and runs fine regardless.

This is with the exception of the page file issue which is my main problem, I would have little issue with the above if it wasn’t for the (related?) page file issues it’s having. It has the maximum allowed 1GB of RAM at the moment so I would think it might be needed at some stage.

Finally got this up and running now - thanks to everyone who replied. Fairly easy solution in the end using the filter driver - got it working using a combination of the above link and the following: https://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=2332.0

Ctrl+Alt+Del also bypasses the stuck “Welcome” screen if you’re ever in the same boat

Thanks all!

For reference, the reason that the XP installer tops out at 32GB is because , regardless of whether you choose FAT32 or NTFS as the file system when creating a partition in the installer, it formats it with FAT32 first, then converts it to NTFS after (if you selected NTFS). However, if you create your partition elsewhere and format it to NTFS, then tell the installer to use it "as is", then there's no such restriction. Doing it this way I've successfully installed Windows XP to a 64GB CF card and also to a 120GB SATA SSD.

I too am having the "removable drive" issue with a CF on a WinXP machine and I too am having an issue whereby the page file is not getting created. And they are definitely related.

I'd really like to know how to fix this.

Glad to hear it is working. I ran into something similar and ended up using a driver set for the IBM Microdrive which ignores the removable media flag to allow pagefiles/etc.

Not sure if it was the best solution, but it did work.

In 2000/XP (noo idea vista+) use this driver to make CF card a permanent drive

greetings